Category: Nietzsche
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Wer schreibt, der bleibt
I fondly recall my late German neighbor, Günter Scheer, from whom I learned this expression. "He who writes, remains." But for how long? Any mark you make will in the end be unmade by time, in time, for all time. We do not write in indelible ink. Old Will said it well: We are such…
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The Enemies of Liberty “Will not go Quietly into the Night”
On the morning of November 6th, I wrote, "But this is no time to gloat over the defeat of our enemies. They will not give up or give in." Here is how Peter Boghossian makes the point. (A little over six minutes.) Now that we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable (my…
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Nietzsche on Conviction
Top o' the Stack
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The Childless as Anthropological Danglers
Top o' the Stack. The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers. Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws that relate mental states to physical…
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Anti-Natalism Article of Mine Now in Print and Online
Vallicella, William F.. "Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?" Perichoresis, vol.21, no.1, 2023, pp.70-83. https://doi.org/10.2478/perc-2023-0005 Abstract This article examines one of the sources of David Benatar’s anti-natalism. This is the view that ‘all procreation is [morally] wrong.’ (Benatar and Wasserman, 2015:12) One of its sources is the claim that each of our…
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The Truth of Life and the Art of Life
We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding. They sense the difference between the true…
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Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life
Substack latest.
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Do You Value This Life? How Much?
It is the hour of death. You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options. You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same. But if every last detail is to be the same,…
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Nietzsche to his Friend Overbeck
"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need. Addendum After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the…
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The Decisive Difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #689, p. 212, written in 1944: The endless chatter about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is quite hopeless. Outward similarities set up a superficial sphere of comparison that is utterly meaningless, for they are localised and limited by a decisive difference at a deeper level; the one prayed,…
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Nietzsche, Truth, and Power
Nietzsche's conflation of truth with power is one source of Critical Race Theory. Substack latest.
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Can the Humanities be Saved?
Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved. HT: Karl White. It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .] This is not…
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Is Life Good? Questioning the Question
I do not begrudge the man who exults: Life is good! For it is good for some at some times and in some places. Such a one is living and exulting, not philosophizing. He is expressing his experience of his particular life: he needn't be trying to be objective, even if he expresses himself in…
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Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?
As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically. By no empirical measure are people equal. We are naturally unequal. And yet we are supposedly equal as persons. This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for…
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If it is all just a tale told by an idiot . . .
. . .why begrudge ordinary folk their retreat into the warm bosom of average everydayness (Heidegger's durchschnittliche Alltaeglichkeit) with its vapid socializing? I do not begrudge them, nor do I try to change them. But there is something base and contemptible about a life without questioning and seeking, a life sunk in divertissement. Here is…